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From: Mary Ann Horton <mah@mhorton.net>
To: tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org
Subject: Re: [TUHS] UNIX: A History and a Memoir by Brian W. Kernighan is now out
Date: Tue, 29 Oct 2019 13:13:48 -0700	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <2b4f016b-5f54-199f-523b-866daf4d11b7@mhorton.net> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <abe1c095-d53c-b673-276f-e64abcd99803@mhorton.net>

Thanks to Jon's super response on the first story, we know it originally 
occurred at Ford Aerospace.

Let me tell the other story. Perhaps someone will know some details.

When I tell it, usually to nontechnical people, I prefix it by 
explaining that UNIX has 3 different grep programs, all of which find 
text in files. There is regular grep. There is fgrep, the "fixed grep", 
which is simpler and only looks for basic text. And there is egrep, the 
"enhanced grep", that will look for fancy patterns and is very powerful. 
You would expect that fgrep, being the simplest, would be the fastest, 
but as it turns out, egrep is the fastest and fgrep is the slowest.

One day at a meeting at Bell Labs, an MTS came rushing into the meeting, 
all out of breath. "Sorry I'm late, I was grepping my apartment for my 
keys."

Dryly, the boss replied "You should have used egrep. It's faster."



  parent reply	other threads:[~2019-10-29 20:14 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 22+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2019-10-20 22:43 Norman Wilson
2019-10-23 23:28 ` arnold
2019-10-23 23:38   ` Warner Losh
2019-10-23 23:59     ` Adam Thornton
2019-11-01 22:24   ` Chris Hanson
2019-10-24 17:31 ` Justin Andrusk
2019-10-25  2:45   ` Earl Baugh
2019-10-28 21:41 ` Mary Ann Horton
2019-10-28 22:09   ` Jon Forrest
2019-10-28 23:01     ` Mary Ann Horton
2019-10-28 23:18       ` Jon Forrest
2019-10-28 23:49       ` Steffen Nurpmeso
2019-10-29  2:05       ` Lawrence Stewart
2019-10-29 20:13   ` Mary Ann Horton [this message]
  -- strict thread matches above, loose matches on Subject: below --
2019-10-20 21:34 Naveen Nathan
2019-10-20 22:05 ` Warner Losh
2019-10-21  2:41   ` Caipenghui
2019-10-21  0:06 ` Larry McVoy
2019-10-21  0:54   ` Jacob Ritorto
2019-10-21 21:40 ` Bakul Shah
2019-10-22 21:38 ` Angelo Papenhoff
2019-10-22 21:51   ` Rob Pike

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